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Black Arts Blog Tour

As you may recall, last week I went to the Launch Party for the paperback of Black Arts, a YA Tudor supernatural thriller. I promised something a bit special from the authors, Jonathan Weil and Andrew Prentice, and here it is! They have very kindly written about their historical research for their book. This is a subject that, as a historian myself, is of great interest to me. I hope you enjoy reading it too...

JW:Hi, we are Prentice and Weil, and we’ve
written a book called Black Arts.It’s set in late Tudor London, and is a dark
and deadly romp: we’ve got black magic, demonic influences, bloody revenge, deranged
preachers, the robber king of Southwark…

AP:All very accurate, if you look at the mayhem
that actually went down in late Tudor London.In fact, we often had to tone it down a little!In this post we’re going to talk about how we
researched the city and the period – and what we learned doing it.

JW:
Navigating the balance between fact and fiction isn’t always easy.What we’re trying to do is create a magical,
exciting world that people can believe in and escape into – not necessarily
recreate the past down to its every last detail…

AP
– Of course, the best thing about writing a historical novel is that there are
so many exciting, weird, and best of all real
details. They’re the best possible resource for building that world. But that’s
also a problem: there’s just too much detail!You dig up all these gloriously ripe nuggets of super-shiny fact, and
you have to throw 95% of them away.This was a hard lesson to learn, and one we had quite a struggle getting
right.

JW – you need to be picky.The right
detail at the right moment makes everything work. But the details have to serve
the story, not the other way round…

AP-
A good example of this would be how we eventually chose to deal with magic.In the first few drafts we wrote, we had a
very complex, entirely invented magic system.It had a glitteringly perfect
structure.It was colour coded!

JW
– …and it just didn’t work.It never
felt real. It was too rational. What we needed was an injection of real-life
craziness…

AP
– All it took in the end was just one detail of what Elizabethans actually
believed about magic…

JW –
Summoning devils, and binding them into magical objects… and from that moment
everything clicked into place.Of
course, the historical reality of Elizabethan magic was much more complex than we
portray in our book. The key was that we found one really suggestive, true detail to hang our hat on.Then we wore it to death.

AP
– Are you saying we wore a hat-stand to death, Jon?

JW –
Let’s move on.What is definitely true,
is that the more research you do – even if you don’t end up using it all – the
more the things you just invent will feel real and consistent.For our dialogue, we used sixteenth century
slang for about half of the thieves’ “cant”, and the other half we made up
completely. (There are a number of cant dictionaries online, if you’re
looking). We wanted it to feel old and real, but we couldn’t find a word for
everything…

AP –
…plus it’s just fun making up words! And if it had all been written in accurate
contemporary slang, I’m not sure we would have understood it, let alone our
readers.

JW
– The same also applied to our characters.For example, we started off having Christopher Marlowe as a character.
There’s a book about him – The Reckoning by
Charles Nicholl, that was one of the seeds of our whole story: it showed us a
whole side of Elizabethan England and especially London – the circles Marlowe
moved in – this murky world where playwrights, blackmailers, courtiers,
traitors, heretics, loan sharks, conmen, magicians and spies were all existing
side by side (often they were the same people!)As the story moved further away from real historical events and deeper
into the realm of fantasy, the character mutated into ‘Kit Morely’ (which is in
fact how the real Christopher Marlowe signed his name). Our Kit still retains
some of the traits of the original – high-living, cynical, untrustworthy and
intellectually unorthodox.

AP – But he didn’t have to die in Deptford
tavern with a knife through his eye!Another
figure we really loved from the period is a superb rogue called Queen Moll.She was a real life gang leader, a receiver
of stolen goods and highwaywoman from the late 16th/early 17th
centuries.She was also a pipe-smoking
transvestite, and the first woman to appear on the London stage, (singing dirty
songs and accompanying herself on the banjo).We took one look at her life, and decided we had to have her.

JW – But she didn’t fit with our
story at all. After the first draft we were forced to cut her.A while later, we were having trouble with another
character – a 13 year old sailor’s daughter called Beth, who was supposed to be
our female lead. She was priggish, law
abiding, a bit of a drag: she just wasn’t coming alive.

AP – Then we realised that we
could take what we loved about Queen Moll, and put her into Beth. What happened
then was that Beth went from being a slightly boring character to this
incredibly badass robber princess, a master of disguise, who is also a stickler
for the rules –the thieves’ rules . . . She became one of our favourite
characters in the whole book.

JW – That’s when you realise all
the research is worth it – when you can
reach back and find just the detail that completes the puzzle.

AP – I call it ‘salting the radish’.I struggled for hours with this one really
simple scene.I was about to throw my
computer out the window and jump out after it, until, in desperation, I opened
one of my history books at random and discovered that the Tudors ate salted
radishes for breakfast.After I put that
in, everything else fell into place.

Thank you very much to Andrew and Jonathan for a very interesting discussion.

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